599 research outputs found
Hydraulic simulations to evaluate and predict design and operation of the Chashma Right Bank Canal
No full textIrrigation systems / Irrigation canals / Flow control / Velocity / Canal regulation techniques / Hydraulics / Simulation models / Design / Operations / Crop-based irrigation / Distributary canals / Water delivery / Policy / Protective irrigation / Water allocation / Water requirements / Sedimentation / Water distribution / Equity / Water conveyance / Pakistan / Chashma Right Bank Canal
A reappraisal of attitudes to the 'People of the Book' in the Qur'an and hadith, with particular reference to Muslim fiscal policy and the covenant of 'Umar
No full textEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
al-Misbāh fī al-Nahw By Nāsir al-Dīn al-Mutarrizī al-Nahwī (d. 610/1213) A Critical Edition of the Text with the Life History of the Author
No full textNāsir al-Dīn al-Mutarrizī al-Nahwī (d.610/1213) was one of the most renowned figures in the field of Arabic Grammar. He has left an indelible mark on the world of Arabic language and literature. He is also known as the successor of al-Zamakhsharī.
He wrote a number of books but his al-Misbāh fī al-Nahw gained prominence at a level that no other book in this field could claim to achieve. For this reason, a great number of commentaries have been written in every age, of which the most famous are al-Daw and Khulāsat al-I‘rāb written by Tāj al-Dīn al-Isfrā’īnī and ‘Abd al- Karīm al-Tūsī (better known as Hājjī Bābā) respectively. Moreover, its translation into other languages also demonstrates its value as a useful book.
Although al-Misbāh has been edited on more than one occasion, the published editions do not fulfil the needs and requirements of modern academic research criteria. The basic aim of this thesis is to present this book with a current modern research style so that the students, teachers and ordinary readers of Arabic language and literature may benefit from this work.
This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the life history of the author and his other works. A brief note of the environment under which he grew up (generally referred to as the ‘Seljuk’ period) is also included in this part.
The second part consists of a text edition that deals with the derivation (Takhrīj) of syntactical issues together with the differing opinions of grammarians on syntactical/grammatical issues. This part also proffers the idiomatic English translation of al-Misbāh
The Hajj : past, present and future: the communication aspect
No full textIt is the aim of this thesis to investigate the work of the Saudi Arabian media and the information services in relation to the Hajj, to examine their policies, procedures and problems faced by them, and to propose solutions and improvements. The basic objective of this study during the Hajj is to examine how the Saudi Arabian media can serve more effectively the needs of the pilgrims, with their different cultures and languages.
An historical examination of the evolution of the Hajj, the services and the media form the background and context for the examination of the current position. The following
research methods were adopted:
1- Group discussions and interviews were carried out amongsts ome of the Islamic media visiting the Hajj in order to highlight any problems and concerns
about the work of the Saudi Arabian media during the Hajj.
2- A content analysis of the Saudi Arabian newspapers
during the Hajj season was carried out using a quota sampling procedure. In total 434 articles were studied using nine coding categories.
3- The content and form of Saudi Arabian radio and television programmes, Hajj handbooks,cassettes and video tapes provided for the pilgrims were analysed.
4- The daily routine of the average pilgrim during the 1993 Hajj season was observed.
This work is divided into eight chapters. The Introduction (Chapter One) covers a statement of the problems, aims of the study and gives the various sources of information. In Chapter Two the historical background of the city of Mecca and the Kaaba is discussed, thus providing the historical aspects of the Hajj. The Saudi Arabian Royal Family and the Hajj are discussedin Chapter Three with respect to the importance of the Hajj as a religious obligation. Chapter Four examines the present Saudi Arabian official Hajj policy and procedures, the ministries and committees administering the Hajj and their terms of reference, and specific problems related to the Muslim calendar, weather, transport, accommodation, food, health, and security. Chapter Five is' devoted to the development of the Saudi Arabian media and their coverage of the Hau. Chapter
Six analyses the problems which face the Saudi Arabian media during the Hai. Chapter Seven deals with proposed solutions. Finally, conclusions are presented regarding the
main features of the present communication systems with regard to the coverage of the Hajj.
There are nine major findings in this study:
1- Much has been written on the history of the two Holy cities of Mecca and al-Madina and Arabia's Hajj before and under the Islam, but little attention has been paid to the communication aspects of information and instruction
available to the pilgrims.
2- The Saudi Arabian media strives to cater for all the pilgrims during their Haij.
3- The Pilgrims, however need more and better targeted information before, as well as after, their arrival in Saudi Arabia.
4- Most of the pilgrims have no radio or television sets in their buildings and so they are not directly exposed to Saudi Arabian Information.
5- The Saudi Arabian Hajj newspapers provide special information supplements, but these are not as effective as had been hoped.
6- The Islamic media delegation which visit Saudi Arabia during the Hajj believes that the Saudi Arabian media does not serve the pilgrims from different cultures adequately as there is a lack of programme targeting and a shortage of
information for non arabic speaking pilgrims.
7- The Saudi Arabian television channels are unable, as yet, to provide services in the main pilgrims' languages, but new technologies should be able to redress this.
8- The Saudi Arabian Radio and TV stations need better scheduling.
9- No systematic study has yet been carried out about the pilgrims' attitudes, their daily movements, access and reaction to the Saudi Arabian Media during the Hail: such a study should form the basis of future media and information
policies
Conversion of African Americans to Islam : a sociological analysis of the Nation of Islam and associated groups
No full text'Conversion of African Americans to Islam: A Sociological Analysis of the Nation of
Islam Associated groups' is an empirical study of the religious experience of people
who had/have distinctive features in terms of race, ethnicity and historical experience.
The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate how African Americans' (AAs) conversion
experience in general, and the Nation of Islam associated groups' conversion in
particular, differ from the studies of recruitment and conversion in the sociology of
religion and New Religion Movements (NRMs). More specifically, their recruitment
and conversion experiences to Islam diverge from those who converted to mainstream
Islam. The study investigates how AAs' historical experience, soci-economic
difficulties and the racism they encountered shaped and influenced their religious
understanding.
Research methods involved participant observations, a survey questionnaire, interviews,
conversations, personal communications and correspondence. To collect ethnographic
data eleven months field research was conducted mainly in the Chicago area and on two
short visits to Detroit, and three years continued communications with Muslim officials
and academics in the area. During the field research and afterwards through personal
communication 181 survey questionnaire responses were received, and 23 Muslim
officials, academics and ordinary Muslims were interviewed through semi-structured,
unstructured interviews, conversation and correspondence.
The thesis begins with a brief history of Islam and Muslims in general and the African
American Muslims (AAMs) in particular. More emphasis is given on the historical
development of the Nation of Islam (NOl). Then in Chapter III, discussions of schisms
in the history of the NOT are examined from sociological perspectives of social and
religious movements. In Chapter IV I aimed to formulate my own perspective to
analyse and study the conversion experiences of AAMs to Islam. I used a multivariate
approach, considering selectively widely held conversion and recruitment theories in the
sociology of the religion. I consider in Chapter V the predisposing conditions for AAMs
that influence their decision-making to join in the NOT, for example, political and
nationalistic sentiments and socio-economic deprivations. In Chapter VI I have applied
different terms to describe their religious experiences, such as conversion, alteration and
reversion. I have analysed further their encounters with the NOT, the methods of
recruitment they used and their major motives for joining the NOT and converting to
Tslam. In the concluding chapters (Chapter VII VTTT) I describe the different responses
of AAMS to Islam following the death of Elijah Muhammad. It is found out that the
Islamic appeal has polarised. While Farakhan's NOT appeared to continue the tradition
and style of the old NOI with the emphasis on nationalistic and socio-economic factors,
Tmam W. D. Mohammed's community turned more to the religious and spiritual aspects
of Tslam. These different approaches led to a polarisation of the appeal of Tslam to
AAMS.
This thesis contributes to knowledge in four key areas; the sociology of religion and
religious movements, the sociology of social and nationalistic movements, religious and
Islamic studies
Annotation of conceptual co-reference and text Mining the Qur'an
No full textThis research contributes to the area of corpus annotation and text mining by developing novel domain specific language resources. Most practical text mining applications restrict their domain. This research restricts the domain to the Qur'anic Text.
In this thesis, a number of pre-processing steps were undertaken and annotation information were added to the Qur'an. The raw Arabic Qur'an was pre-processed into morphological units using the Qur'anic Arabic Corpus (QAC). Qur'anic terms were indexed and converted into a vector space model using techniques in Information Retrieval (IR). In parallel, nearly 24,000 Qur'anic personal pronouns were annotated with information on their referents. These referents are consolidated and organized into a total of over 1,000 ontological concepts. Moreover, a dataset of nearly 8,000 pairs of related Qur'anic verses are compiled from books of scholarly commentary on the Qur'an. This vector space model, the pronoun tagging, the verse relatedness dataset, and the part-of-speech tags available in QAC all together served for a number of Qur'anic text mining applications which were rendered online for public use. Among these applications: lemma concordance, collocation, POS search of the Qur'an, verse similarity measures, concept clouds of a given verse, pronominal anaphora and Qur'anic chapter similarity.
Furthermore, machine learning experiments were conducted on automatic detection of verse similarity/relatedness as well as categorization of Qur'anic chapters based on their chronology of revelation. Domain specific linguistic features were investigated to induct learning algorithms. Results show that deep linguistic and world knowledge is needed to reach the human upper bound in certain computational tasks such as detecting text relatedness, question answering and textual entailment. However, many useful queries can be addressed using text mining techniques and layers of annotations made available through this research. The works presented here can be extended to include other similar texts like Hadith (i.e., saying of Prophet Muhammad), or other scriptures like the Gospels
Istihsan (juristic preference) : the forgotten principle of Islamic law
No full textEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Enhancing spatial resolution of remotely sensed data for mapping freshwater environments
No full textFreshwater environments are important for ecosystem services and biodiversity. These environments are subject to many natural and anthropogenic changes, which influence their quality; therefore, regular monitoring is required for their effective management. High biotic heterogeneity, elongated land/water interaction zones, and logistic difficulties with access make field based monitoring on a large scale expensive, inconsistent and often impractical. Remote sensing (RS) is an established mapping tool that overcomes these barriers. However, complex and heterogeneous vegetation and spectral variability due to water make freshwater environments challenging to map using remote sensing technology. Satellite images available for New Zealand were reviewed, in terms of cost, and spectral and spatial resolution. Particularly promising image data sets for freshwater mapping include the QuickBird and SPOT-5. However, for mapping freshwater environments a combination of images is required to obtain high spatial, spectral, radiometric, and temporal resolution. Data fusion (DF) is a framework of data processing tools and algorithms that combines images to improve spectral and spatial qualities. A range of DF techniques were reviewed and tested for performance using panchromatic and multispectral QB images of a semi-aquatic environment, on the southern shores of Lake Taupo, New Zealand. In order to discuss the mechanics of different DF techniques a classification consisting of three groups was used - (i) spatially-centric (ii) spectrally-centric and (iii) hybrid. Subtract resolution merge (SRM) is a hybrid technique and this research demonstrated that for a semi aquatic QuickBird image it out performed Brovey transformation (BT), principal component substitution (PCS), local mean and variance matching (LMVM), and optimised high pass filter addition (OHPFA). However some limitations were identified with SRM, which included the requirement for predetermined band weights, and the over-representation of the spatial edges in the NIR bands due to their high spectral variance. This research developed three modifications to the SRM technique that addressed these limitations. These were tested on QuickBird (QB), SPOT-5, and Vexcel aerial digital images, as well as a scanned coloured aerial photograph. A visual qualitative assessment and a range of spectral and spatial quantitative metrics were used to evaluate these modifications. These included spectral correlation and root mean squared error (RMSE), Sobel filter based spatial edges RMSE, and unsupervised classification. The first modification addressed the issue of predetermined spectral weights and explored two alternative regression methods (Least Absolute Deviation, and Ordinary Least Squares) to derive image-specific band weights for use in SRM. Both methods were found equally effective; however, OLS was preferred as it was more efficient in processing band weights compared to LAD. The second modification used a pixel block averaging function on high resolution panchromatic images to derive spatial edges for data fusion. This eliminated the need for spectral band weights, minimised spectral infidelity, and enabled the fusion of multi-platform data. The third modification addressed the issue of over-represented spatial edges by introducing a sophisticated contrast and luminance index to develop a new normalising function. This improved the spatial representation of the NIR band, which is particularly important for mapping vegetation. A combination of the second and third modification of SRM was effective in simultaneously minimising the overall spectral infidelity and undesired spatial errors for the NIR band of the fused image. This new method has been labelled Contrast and Luminance Normalised (CLN) data fusion, and has been demonstrated to make a significant contribution in fusing multi-platform, multi-sensor, multi-resolution, and multi-temporal data. This contributes to improvements in the classification and monitoring of fresh water environments using remote sensing
Astragalus wui M. Idrees & Z. Y. Zhang 2021, nom. nov.
No full textAstragalus wui M. Idrees & Z.Y. Zhang, nom. nov. Replaced name:— Astragalus sylvaticus Y.H. Wu (2015: 718), nom. illeg., non A. sylvaticus (Pall.) Willd. (1802: 1300). Type:— CHINA. Xinjiang: Yecheng Country, Sukepiya, in border forest, alt. 3000 m, 15 Aug. 1987, Exped. Qinghai-Tibet Wu Yuhu 1067 (holotype: QTPMB, not seen). Etymology:—The specific epithet honours Prof. Dr. Wu Yuhu (Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Science, Xining, China), author of the replaced name, who first described this new species.Published as part of Idrees, Muhammad & Zhang, Zhiyong, 2021, Astragalus wui, a new replacement name for A. sylvaticus Y. H. Wu (Galegeae, Papilionoideae, Fabaceae), pp. 210-211 in Phytotaxa 524 (3) on page 210, DOI: 10.11646/phytotaxa.524.3.6, http://zenodo.org/record/564936
Conflict of law and the methodology of Tarjīẖ : a study in Islamic legal theory
No full textIslamic law never achieved unity but expressed itself in, at least, four surviving schools. More interestingly, contemporary Muslim communities are still divided among themselves on a number of issues related to their laws. This work describes how problem of legal conflicts have been tackled by Muslim jurists. It is an attempt to examine closely the phenomenon of conflict in Islamic law from the standpoint of usūl-al-fiqh or Islamic legal theory. In fact, much is heard nowadays of the contradiction in the body of Islamic law. Whilst in contrast, little is presented in terms of the methodology of removing this conflict. The present work therefore, attempts to redress this balance. The emphasis of the work will be concerned primarily with tarjīh methodology ; how to give preference to one piece of evidence or argument over the other when they conflict. Nevertheless, considerable concern is given to investigating the background to the conflict of law in the Shari'ah.
This study of a neglected area in Islamic legal scholarship will be an important source of reference to students, both practising and theoretical jurists or to anyone who merely wishes to increase his knowledge of legal themes, particularly legal conflict. The very aim of the work is to argue that conflict is a natural and unavoidable consequence of legal study because legal conflict is only conflicting principles and arguments adduced by both the classical and modern jurists to reach what is actually intended by God in the target case. Therefore, conflicts are inevitable in most of the cases in fiqh owing to the variety of principles set out to deal with one piece of legal evidence, let alone with all the pieces of legal evidence in question.
Tarjīh is therefore, an important and workable instrument in the re-examination of these conflicts and in arriving at the most accurate principle for establishing the law for as long as this is possible. It is hoped that the discovery of new facts and the increase of knowledge which results from the broadening and deepening of the research will positively contribute to the process of unification of Islamic law
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